Product Recognition is a challenging task. Increasingly, users buy products on-line, for example from well-known e-commerce web sites such as Amazon, Newegg or Walmart. This increase in on-line trade has resulted in a corresponding increase in the interest of suppliers and manufacturers in these online forums and indeed a desire for product coverage in these forums. As a result there is increased investment in information technology in order to increase sales by means of implementing efficient product search services. A popular method is to offer straightforward web-services in order not only to find the reviews, specifications availability and prices of products from different retailers but also to purchase them.
The evolution in portable electronic devices, such as smartphones and tablets, provides a perfect environment for on-line shopping. The goal of web services implemented on these devices is to provide an attractive and alternative environment for searching for product information and proceed to purchase these products.
Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is increasingly used for product comparison to improve the search and retrieval of product information by looking at the content of images in order to return results that match a particular query. The emerging field of Product Image Retrieval (PIR) breaks the product recognition problem into two categories: systems where users get online information regarding a product by snapping a picture of a product with a camera-device (smartphone or tablet) and systems where a vertical search is performed based on domain-specific search such as “Philips TV” domain. In the latter case, focused crawlers/parsers extract the informative content from web product-pages and try to recognize the product by taking into consideration text content and corresponding product images that appear in the web product page. Almost all the existing PIR approaches involve CBIR techniques. However, it is desirable to provide an improved method of CBIR which extracts informative content from web pages and automatically and efficiently recognizes the product from webpages under consideration. It is further desirable to provide a real time and accurate CBIR system for the representation of images, which reduces the feature vector while at the same time maintaining accuracy through a large set of features.